One of the points that has stuck in my craw as PRISM has unfolded was the refusal, especially on the part of non-Americans, to believe that this wasn’t exclusively an American problem. As awful as PRISM is, quite a few Western governments are worse when it comes to privacy, and it seemed, at best, disingenuous to assume there weren’t similar programs in other countries. Something Edward Snowden has more or less confirmed.

Now, granted that it’s in Snowden’s interest to play up just how far-reaching government surveillance is. That said, he dropped a pretty major bomb in the middle of a rare interview:

I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn’t recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world. In the wake of this year’s disclosures, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless.

Again, this isn’t really a surprise, per se. Like we said, as bad as America is in some respects, other countries are worse. And it’s safe to assume that 99% of what you’re doing goes unread because there’s little if anything that, say, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service cares about.

At the same time, it’s been a little too easy for Americans and non-Americans both to try and play off privacy and snooping as a strictly American problem. Until a few more Snowdens come forward, or until a few lawsuits clear a few courtrooms, we’re probably not going to know the full extent of it.

But consider for a moment that programs like PRISM have been going on for years, and are in fact fairly standard for intelligence agencies. It seems unlikely other countries haven’t kept up with the state of the art. It also explains why I have such a hard time at the Canadian border, but that’s another post entirely.

The report from ITIF.org that’s making news says “the reality is that most developed countries have mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs) which allow them to access data from third parties whether or not the data is stored domestically.” This tells me that no data is secure nowhere no how.

It’s clear that our only recourse to make ourselves small. We’ve got to become tinier targets. How? Start using Tails & TOR for browsing, Textcrypt for text messages and Cellcrypt for mobile phone calls. Then, take everything off of Dropbox, Instagram, iCloud, etc, and stash it all in a Cloudlocker (www.cloudlocker.it) which works just the same but stays in the house where they still need a warrant to get inside.

I’m sure we’re going to seem more and better tools like these appear as soon as good ol Yankee ingenuity revs up. But what a shame that it’s come to this.

man I had a shit-ton of difficulty at the canadian border over 10 years ago myself. granted I might have told the dude I was going to to get some pot because I had heard that it was accepted more or less in vancouver. funny we were actually denied entrance the first time because my friend failed to discloe the amount of money he was coming in with despite the fact (which we didn’t know) that they were just asking how much money we had so they could assume we would be able to support ourselves while there.

and then there was the absolutely gorgeous chick the next day, she looked like the girl with the green eyes from the famous time or newsweek or soemthing cover. anyway I had to lie to her unfortunately about my license not really being suspened, afterall I had the physical thing right there in my possession I said, when in truth I just never surrendered it was ruled that my license would be suspended. anyway it was cool, we hit up hastings and saw everybody trying to peddle virtually anything and we managed to get grams of dank for no more than $10 a piece. one dude who walked up to my deal in progress right there in broad-daylight on the diewalk of a busy street told my dealer “nah man, give him 3 for 20″ though dealer chose not to do so.